Appeasement not answer for America in Iran

By Chase Miller
Collegian Reporter
September 13, 2006

Those pesky Iranians are at it again; this time, it’s global. In a land where Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini made it undeniably evident that Iran is against anything Western and naturally American, a new poster boy for anti-Americanism emerges into the international arena. This figurehead is the newly elected President of the “republic” of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is as bombastic as the Saddam Husseins of the world. However there is a disheartening difference between he and Hussein: he actually will have weapons of mass destruction capabilities and is willing to use them.

These nuclear ambitions don’t seem to be the idle musings of a few bearded men in some government building in Tehran, either. The most unsettling part about the Iranian situation is the political clout that Ahmadinejad has developed in his relatively short political career. After spending some time as the ironfisted mayor of Tehran, his ideologies and appeal to the conservative, religious-extremist base of Iran produced enough steam for him to be elected by universal suffrage in August 2005. He was the only presidential candidate to take a regressive stance on future U.S.-Iranian relations. Jennifer Brea of About.com says his view on the United Nations wasn’t so peachy, either, saying the United Nations is, “one-sided, stacked against the world of Islam.”

Mix all of these components with a botched and wrongful war in neighboring Iraq, a spaghetti western’s worth of cowboy rhetoric and past U.S.-Iranian interaction wrought with tight-fisted, teeth-clenched showdowns with Ayatollahs, and what do you have: a seething, percolating, festering hatred stew, that’s what.

So what is America to do? How do we deal with Khrushchev – err…I mean Ahmadinejad? (Sorry, I’m losing track of my dictators bent on nuclear Holocaust.) Well, one idea is appeasement, a fancy political term for timidly looking the other way. If that word seems slightly familiar, it should.

In the foreboding months leading up to the Second World War, appeasement was common practice by the League of Nations (you know, the prequel to the United Nations). When Hitler was tearing through Europe with Napoleon-esq vigor, the League did nothing except bury its head in the sand; that was until the last straw: Poland. No hard feelings, Czechoslovakia.

The same was true for Mussolini’s pre-WWII military acquisition of Ethiopia. My point is that the League of Nations hesitated when these two separate but related occasions occurred. Instead, they should have intervened and used their dozens of delegates to…well, delegate. Of course, the punch line of this all is World War II, showing that although appeasement might seem like the right idea to avoid armed conflict, it can lead to a greater conflict: one of Steven Spielberg proportions.

So now that appeasement is out, unilateral invasion with a “Coalition of the Willing” is in, right? Round two of hide-and-go-seek the WMDs? Not quite. The answer in this situation seems to be taking the highroad – which happens to be paved through middle ground. If we appease Iran in its obviously bogus attempts at developing their civilian power grid, we could end up with a war of WWII’s magnitude, only this time with a Cuban Missile Crisis twist. If we as a nation decide to invade Iran, we might be throwing another large hunk of American dime in an Iraq-like quicksand, not to mention how many of our boys will sink along with it.

The solution is to sit shotgun while the United Nations drives the diplomacy wagon. Let multilateralism prove itself in Iran like it could have in Iraq if Colin Powell hadn’t obstructed it. I know what you’re saying, though, “Aren’t they the same as the League of Nations; won’t they screw it up again?” Lately, it doesn’t seem so.

One implement the United Nations has, in my opinion, which the late League never possessed is an effective Security Council. The League hesitated to intervene in Hitler’s and Mussolini’s conquests because no member nation would commit any boots on the ground to be the punctuation to its declarations and sanctions. This time around, Great Britain, France, Israel, the majority of the European Union and a good portion of the United Nations are publicly avowing their disapproval of Iranian enrichment of uranium.

Furthermore, Secretary General Kofi Annan was quoted in Madrid’s daily newspaper El Pais saying that Iranian referral to the Security Council, “will not be in Iran’s favor or that of the region,” and “the best solution to the issue is [peace] talks.”

So there you have it. Diplomacy wins again when the United Nations does what it was created to do: prevent wars. It’s indoctrinated – look it up. If we can be America – a superpower among superpowers – we might not have to feebly defer to appeasement and battle out the demons of our decision later on down the line. Additionally, there is no shame in being number one and having to rely on numbers two, three and maybe nine to prevent war and promote a utilitarian agenda.

millerc10@lasalle.edu